Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the man who helped to tell the world about the horrors of communist Russia and its defining institution, the network of forced labour camps known as the Gulag, has died.
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0023. LOX tanking is in progress; there has been some audio coming across now on the live feed. 0025: Note that they are in an ‘unplanned hold’ at the moment. Second tank LOX fill is happening and I believe I heard them discussing Helium pressurization. 0027: On the video you can see the LOX venting on the second stage. 0031: If you think the video quality s… is less than optimal, you are not alone! 0045: http://www.spacex.com/webcast.php in case you don’t know where to go. There is an Aussie presenter at SpaceX you will notice. 0058: I am having diffs due to the bandwidth the video is sucking up, so my posting may be more erratic than I would have liked. When you see the public affairs team again, the thing behind them marked Dragon is the mockup of the manned capsule they will be flying to ISS in the 2012 time frame. 0129: You may have noticed they lost video for awhile until someone rebooted their Mac streaming application. We are down into the t-30 range and all is looking good so far. Other than my Virgin Media cable connection which keeps seems to go off line entirely every now and again… 0133: This rock is so highly automated that there are a lot fewer people acting as controllers than in old fashioned 20th century artillery rockets. Things will not get really interesting until we get into the last few minutes. Also, remember that they have on board cameras so we will get live feeds from the rocket during ascent. Last time we had a really good view of the 2nd stage engine bell glowing red hot as it fired. 0246: My link was down for about 45 minutes… I am hoping it will stay up long enough for me to watch the launch! Looks like they are still in a hold so I have not missed anything big. 0251: The detanking is something they did last time as well. If things take too long, the fuel starts getting cold and this caused a shutdown on flight 2 because the thrust is below nominal if the temps are wrong. 0310: Since I have to sit and wait like everyone else, perhaps I can give a bit more explanation. They have a Helium tank there for pressurization I presume, at least from the size of it. Helium is a super cryogen. It makes LOX look like burning petrol by comparison. If they sit too long, the Helium starts chilling the fuel, which is Kerosene. You want your fuel and oxidizer to be warm and volatile when you 0319: The have restarted the count and launch is now scheduled for about 0300 UTC, which would be about 0400 here since we are on BDT. Weather at Kwajalein is crystal clear by the way, at least from the weather map! 0325:They are back on the air doing the recycle. Incidentally, you may have noticed that the webcast appears to be done by a video camera focused on a computer screen at the Hawthorne facility. My guess is they have a single circuit from Kwaj and for security reasons wanted to totally isolate the public net from the operations net. I would do the same, but perhaps a little differently. It may simply come down to them having too little time to do anything more than this work around. This is all pure speculation on my part, but it is based on doing a paper system level design for an LCC for someone else. 0338: It looks like along with the rewind of the count we are also getting a replay of the video clips we saw earlier… I’d rather listen to the control loop myself! 0344: Their Mac video application just fell over again… and a few minutes later the talking heads are repeating the same description of the Falcon 1 that they did a couple hours ago. Meanwhile, while they jabber on, from other sources on Kwaj I read that everything is in the green. We should be about 15 minutes or less from launch now. 0352: While they are showing silly repeats, terminal count is about to start, or probably has. Everything is go for launch at the moment. 0403: A terminal abort, But there could still be a launch tonight. Er this morning. I think this is a good time for me to put the kettle on… 0415: If you have been reading the announcements, they think they may recycle the count to t-10, which means they have had a minor issue. The automatic check out that happens at ignition is extraordinary fascist and they want it that way: you can’t bring it back to the pad once you’ve launched! 0426: Wow. They have recycled to t-10 terminal count start in almost no time! 0440: They called it an anomaly. I wish they had not killed the video so quickly… the plume from the first stage was looking rather strange just before that, with streaks and instabilities that didn’t look right to me, also I was seeing a greyish color that did not seem quite right. But I could be totally wrong. We will just have to wait for more information. Not what I was hoping for tonight, but this is rocket science… The most likely response to an ‘anomaly’ is flight termination. 0530: Well, I am calling it quits as there is unlikely to be any real news for quite some time. The vehicle either blew itself up or was commanded to do so; I have the impression it performed its own self disassembly but have nothing to back that up. My own eyeballs are on the new regen engine bell but I will with hold judgement until I have had a chance to watch the video again and more importantly have some expert feedback. But tonight, with my bed calling, I will place my bets on the new engine, perhaps the regen cooling channels. It is a wild stab in the dark and I will probably disagree with myself by the time I have some sleep. But there you go. Good night all. 0552: Elon issued a statement, and here is an excerpt on the problem:
August 3rd, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Spacex will attempt the third launch of the Falcon 1 tonight at 1600 PDT / 1900 EDT / 2300 UTC. You can go here and test your video set up with the available webtest.php link. Video will go live around 30 minutes before the scheduled launch time. I will attempt to add comments here as it happens if I have any thoughts that might be useful to our readers. August 2nd, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Make: has a wonderful way of dealing with security cameras. 
August 2nd, 2008 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
SpaceX has just test fired nine engines at full thrust in the full Falcon 9 configuration, a test I was not expecting to see until this fall at the earliest. According to their press release:
I will admit to being caught totally flat footed by this announcement. Given that the Falcon 1 launch at Kwajalein is due any time now I felt certain the company’s full attention would be focused there. I guess Elon and his crew are better multi-taskers than I gave them credit for.  Falcon 9 first stage on test stand: nine Merlin 1C engines at full thrust. Photo: courtesy SpaceX August 1st, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have just received some photos from one of our XCOR readers who has had the good fortune to actually fly in one these beauties.  Getting ready for takeoff. Photo: With thanks to Mike Massee/XCOR/Rocket Racing League  Rolling down the runway with a tail of fire. Photo: With thanks to Mike Massee/XCOR/Rocket Racing League  It must have been really loud where the photographer was standing! Photo: With thanks to Mike Massee/XCOR/Rocket Racing League You can also see some flight video and an interview with the test pilot here . August 1st, 2008 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
I ran across an interesting quote by linguist Steven Pinker in the july 5th issue of New Scientist:
The interview went on to suggest several reasonable possibilities, including the spread of the concept of a fair and impartial judiciary but left out two which I think may be very important: wealth and freedom. July 31st, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“We all know that politics is a con some of the time. It has begun to feel like politics is a con almost all of the time.” Well, some of us have never thought much of politics in the first place, certainly not politics as a professional job. July 31st, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I used to visit the South of France as a kid and one day, walking down the beach in St Tropez, yours truly, then a pretty wet-behind-the-ears lad from Suffolk, espied a whole row of lovely French women lying on the beach with nary a stitch on. Mon dieu! After my silly childish embarrassment wore off, I thought nothing of it after a while. It appears that for health and fashion reason, though, that the lovelies of Europe are covering up. One of the main factors may be a concern about skin cancer. Also, I notice that in France, a lot of the men and women’s skin gets very lined and aged if they sit out a lot in the sun, so for reasons of vanity or beauty – depending on your point of view – it makes sense to cover up. I have to watch it in the sun as I am pretty fair-skinned. I did sort of half wonder whether any of this story from France has something to do with the large Muslim immigrant population in the South of France that takes a dim view of baring any female flesh at all. It does make one wonder. I hope not. July 31st, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 31st, 2008 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is not the first time I have seen images of this bird in flight, but it is the first public venue at which a Rocket Racer has flown and the second rocket powered aircraft ever to fly at the Oshkosh AirVenture. The first was a few years back (four? five?) and was also an XCOR powered craft, the EZ-Rocket, trailered from Mojave to Oshkosh by that company. The XCOR engined Rocket Racer is a larger Lox/Kerosene rocket plane with at about 10 minutes airborne endurance if the burn times are well utilized. The pilot, Astronaut Richard Searfoss, certainly knows his burns and knows the engine inside out as he was test pilot for XCOR during engine development. A second Rocket Racer is also on display at AirVenture, with an Armadillo Aerospace alcohol/LOX engine. It has not yet received FAA certification but they hope that will occur before the Reno Races when the Rocket Racing League hopes to have both craft in the air together. For now though, a hearty congratulations to our readers at XCOR who made it possible.  XCOR engined Rocket Racer in flight at Oshkosh. This was the only reasonable photo I could find: the email address of the press contact for RRL given on their site bounces! Photo: Rocket Racing League July 30th, 2008 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The first WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft was rolled out of its hanger in the Mojave desert on Monday. The second stage vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, has been held back due to the ongoing investigations into the test stand accident of one year ago. Although that accident was little more than a plumbing and pressure test, there is as yet no full understanding of exactly what happened. Because of this uncertainty, Burt has delayed much development of SpaceShipTwo so as to avoid building things he might later have to rip out. This is the reason why the target date for passenger service has slipped into the 2010 time frame. Still, the roll out of WK2 is a major milestone. As you can see in the photo, it is not a small aircraft! You gain an even better impression of that size from the raw press release video clip. (if you do not have a quick time plug-in, you may need to download first)  Monday July 28, 2008. Roll out of WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft ‘VMS Eve’ at Mojave Spaceport. Photo: courtesy of Virgin Galactic July 30th, 2008 | Comments are closed
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